Guiding spatial attention by multimodal reward cues

Our attention is constantly captured and guided by visual and/or auditory inputs. One key contributor to selecting relevant information from the environment is reward prospect. Intriguingly, while both multimodal signal processing and reward effects on attention have been widely studied, research on multimodal reward signals is lacking. Here, we investigated this using a Posner task featuring peripheral cues of different modalities (audiovisual/visual/auditory), reward prospect (reward/no-reward), and cue-target stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs 100-1,300 ms). We found that audiovisual and visual reward cues (but not auditory ones) enhanced cue-validity effects, albeit with different time courses (Experiment 1). While the reward-modulated validity effect of visual cues was pronounced at short SOAs, the effect of audiovisual reward cues emerged at longer SOAs. Follow-up experiments exploring the effects of visual (Experiment 2) and auditory (Experiment 3) reward cues in isolation showed that reward modulated performance only in the visual condition. This suggests that the differential effect of visual and auditory reward cues in Experiment 1 is not merely a result of the mixed cue context, but confirms that visual reward cues have a stronger impact on attentional guidance in this paradigm. Taken together, it seems that adding an auditory reward cue to the inherently dominant visual one led to a shift/extension of the validity effect in time - instead of increasing its amplitude. While generally being in line with a multimodal cuing benefit, this specific pattern highlights that different reward signals are not simply combined in a linear fashion but lead to a qualitatively different process.